Slide Sharing in a Distracted World

In an era where many audiences are being pulled in 100 different directions be it from social media, work emails or the 24/7 news cycle, creating an engaging and captivating presentation that retains the attention of your audience is essential to the success of the event.

Here are some of our top tips to keep your slide deck interesting:

Pre-Event:

Four Steps for Quality Slides -

Step One: Content

When starting your slide deck journey, the majority of people begin by creating the slides first. This has one potential pitfall - relevance. Your starting point needs to be about the big picture. What is your key message? What message do you want your audience members to walk away with after the sharing your slides? The content of your slides needs to stand on its own. Your slides need to have a consistent thread that ensures relevance. Slides during a presentation act as a visual aid and not a medium for delivering content.

Step Two: Design

The key word when designing your slides to be shared is consistency. Many people do not have access to a UX or UI colleague to help give your slides a touch of finesses, so a fantastic starting point is to use a slide sharing solution. Long gone are the days where Microsoft PowerPoint was your go-to solution. Today presenters have a myriad of options; we’d recommend either Canva or Haiku Deck. You can check out our 10 PowerPoint Alternatives in 2018 for more recommendations.

At Glisser, we’re fortunate enough to have our Head of Design, Simon Mauro Guido offer up some tips on how to create beautiful slides!

You don’t have to be a designer to come up with a good-looking presentation, tools like Haiku Deck and Canva have great templates to use as a starting point.

Consistency is really important when it comes to the look of your slide deck. Set a font size and slide colours and stick to it throughout - it’ll make a big difference.

Whilst decorative fonts can look more interesting, try to use them sparingly. They are usually much more difficult to read and can distract from your content if not suited perfectly. Perhaps use them for headings only, with a clear, legible font for any sentence text and statements. And never use Comic Sans!

Both Canva and Haiku Deck are Glisser friendly as they can be saved in either PPT or PDF format.

Step Three: Text

The mantra Less is more is true when it comes text in slide sharing. Avoid cramming your slides with dense paragraphs because I guarantee your audience members will lose interest. If the text on the slides you’re sharing is just a reiteration of what you’re saying out loud it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Why would you not just send each member a written report? The concept of slide sharing is an overall encapsulating delivery, rather than a monotonous repetition, put simply it's more engaging for your audience as they can solely concentrate on you!

Step Four: Visuals

Slide sharing should be a powerful tool to convey your message. A quick easy way to create an emotional bond with your audience is through photographs. Whilst photos should not distract your audience from your spoken message, they should help resonate it. For example, it could be a metaphor for the point that you’re trying to make or an emotive photograph if you’re trying to appeal to a cause.

Here are some examples of engaging yet simple slides:

At the event:

Now you’ve got your slides in check, it’s time to deliver!

Whether you’re presenting to 5 people in an internal training session or to 1000 delegates at a conference, delivery is crucial. Glisser is the perfect tool to assist you.

It’s inevitable that attendees will be on their phones at some point during your presentation, so why not ensure their attention is on your slides and not their friend’s eggs benedict. Glisser’s slide sharing functionality gives you that peace of mind and confidence boost.

Moreover, in addition to slide sharing, Glisser’s interactive features such as Live Polling and Digital Q&A help keep your presentation engaging on multiple levels.

Post-Event:

Once you’ve hit your presentation out the park, you might consider giving your content a greater reach by uploading it online if you have a website or blog. This can be done with minimal effort and is a great way to enhance your post-event feedback.

Follow these quick steps to embed your Glisser presentation:

Go into your Glisser account and select your presentation.

On the right hand side of your Glisser screen you will have the option to embed the presentation into another website.

Select Embed, and then copy and paste the code wherever you want the presentation to appear in your website or blog.

As touched upon above, this can enable your post-event feedback and is a useful way to engage with attendees who want to follow up or people who might've missed your presentation. As it will include your polls, you can use it as a data gathering tool for you in the future to help increase the reach of your content and provides valuable marketing data.

Alternatively, SlideShare is a fantastic medium as well. With a reach of over 60 million unique users per month, you can add credibility to your professional repertoire and project it to your LinkedIn connections. You will then be able to direct traffic from your SlideShare presentation to your website or blog.

As you have undoubtedly already created visual slides for your presentation, you now need to optimise your content to gain maximum exposure.

Here are some optimisation tips:

Filename – this needs to include keywords that will rank

Title – this will be used by Google to index your content and be displayed in the search results. Try and be as concise as possible!

Description - as with a website page or blog, the first 155 characters of the description will be displayed in Google’s search results. In SlideShare, you can include more detail in your description.

Tags – these are important as they ensure viewers can find you content. So again, try and be specific to your content.

Category – As viewers filter content based on categories, be sure to label your presentation with the correct categories.

Links within the content – after the first three slides of your presentation, you’re able to include links within your content. This is the crucial optimisation step as it generates more traffic to your blog or website.

Content – you need to ensure your content includes relevant keywords you want to rank. This will be the same keywords as in your presentation/summary blog.

Sharing – Finally, ensure your SlideShare privacy settings are set so people can share/embed your content on their own blogs or websites.